Brugal 1888 Rum, Reviewed by the Bon Appetit Foodist

Up until now, I’ve talked about gins, bourbons, vodkas, and even hazelnut Baileys in this column, but I haven’t talked about one single bottle of rum. I’m a big fan of classic rum drinks when they’re done right, like daiquiris and tiki drinks, but unless I’m in a very particular time and place (i.e., on a Caribbean island, with my feet in the sand), you generally won’t find me sipping an aged rum. I know a little about the different island styles, and I don’t have a stake in the rabid rum partisan game, but I do know that there’s a lot of good rum, and a lot of crappy, mass-produced stuff. And that’s without even mentioning flavored rums, which should not be mentioned.

Brugal rum is the Dominican Republic’s biggest rum producer, whatever that’s supposed to mean as far as flavor goes, but I do know that this bottle of
Brugal 1888 tastes good. Which makes sense, because I might be smack in the middle of their target demographic. The company’s official literature is calling this a “rum for whiskey lovers,” and it’s easy to see why: it has a bourbon-y nose, is dry on the palate, and doesn’t have the same round, “swishing a Werther’s around in your mouth” kind of taste you’d normally get from a nice, aged rum. It’s aged in medium-charred white oak casks (that used to be used for bourbon) for a minimum of six years, and then gets two to four more in old sherry casks, which brings out a level of oakiness familiar to anyone who’s into bourbons or single malts.

Not-at-all coincidentally, Brugal is owned by the same parent company as Macallan and Highland Park, two Scotch labels that have already jumped all over the current boom in brown spirits. It was only a matter of time before we saw a “whiskey-like” rum hit the market, and it makes sense that they were the ones to do it. At $50 a bottle, you might be better off getting actual whiskey or a rummier aged rum, if that’s what you’re looking for, but the 1888 is an interesting mix of the two, with a little more sugary zing on the tongue than you’d get from a typical bourbon. I don’t know the next time a rum will be the Bottle in Front of Me, but this definitely wasn’t a bad place to start.